Rutgers suffering high cost of mismanagement

Rutgers University spent nearly a half-million dollars this year for a law firm to investigate the school's mishandling of accusations that former head basketball coach Mike Rice abused his players verbally and physically. If that sounds like an outrageous amount, also keep in mind that it supposedly represents a whopper discount - of about 50 percent - from the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Now we could sit back and bemoan the egregiously bloated costs of legal services and wonder aloud just how many of those 1,000-plus reported hours spent on the probe were really needed to produce a 38-page report concluding that the school botched the entire affair and should do things differently. Recommendations had many important sounds terms like "risk management systems," but all any of it amounts to should be this: Stop hiding from problems when they occur.

So was it all worth the money? Probably not. Then again, outrageous legal fees at taxpayer expense is par for the course for just about any public institution or governing body. But the investigation had to be done, after the university so thoroughly mangled the process. The $481,685 is the price of ineptitude. This time.

Hindsight always provides clarity, but the Rice affair didn't have to be so complicated or controversial. All that was needed was for university president Robert Barchi to have taken the allegations more seriously from the start. If he had done that, if early on he had actually bothered to watch the videotape documenting the abusive tactics, then Barchi would have - we hope - taken steps to assure that Rice was ousted. It wouldn't have been left to former athletic director Tim Pernetti to decide upon punishment and then waffle in the face of a skeptical legal team, until public release of the video triggered outrage and further action against Rice. The university's general counsel was also pushed out the door in the fallout.

Or maybe Barchi would have backed off anyway. What we do know is that while Rice's actions alone were bad enough, it was all made worse by the stench of apathy, attempted cover-up, and a pervasive feeling that the school was too worried about bad publicity to do the right thing.

So the school gets stuck with an enormous bill to decipher all of the bungling. Yet the problems continue. The school brought in a new AD, Julie Hermann, who herself had been accused of abusive coaching tactics in the past, something she failed to share with those involved in the search for Pernetti's successor. Hermann, not surprisingly, has already become embroiled in a controversy involving a football player claiming to be bullied by a coach, and the player's parents disputing Hermann's claims to have spoken with the parents about the incident. Hermann subsequently recanted in scarcely believable fashion, saying she must have spoken with someone who SAID he was the player's father. Get ready for more investigatory costs from this fiasco.

Such dysfunctional management atop the athletic department has become all too common - and costly - and yet Barchi keeps insisting that, no, no, tuition will not be increased to cover the expense. Of course if tuition is increased and university officials blame other reasons, who would ever know the true cause? Meanwhile Hermann wants to spend, spend, spend on sports, and football in particular, to make Rutgers Big Ten-worthy as the school joins the conference next year.

None of this sounds like a department trying to get its finances in check. That $481,000 could be just the start of a wave of unnecessary spending for which students and taxpayers will be paying soon enough.

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Rutgers suffering high cost of mismanagement

Rutgers University spent nearly a half-million dollars this year for a law firm to investigate the school's mishandling of accusations that former head basketball coach Mike Rice abused his players

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